5:35 a.m. 64 degrees, wind N 0 mph. Sky: a shroud of fog that drips off leaves, an odd rain; every hill erased. Permanent streams; languish. Wetlands: distant shoreline, a run of spruce and fir, all shape, no color. Pond: the sky comes down to the water.
Having nothing to say: alder flycatcher, pewee, blue-headed vireo, Nashville warbler, black-throated green warbler, parula warbler, chestnut-side warbler, black-throated blue warbler, yellowthroat, winter wren, raven, crows, robin, hermit thrush, chickadee
Moved to music: scarlet tanager, red-eyed vireo (such a surprise), phoebe, titmouse, veery, blue jay
A hairy woodpecker chips the stub of aspen; sounds like hunt-and-peck typing, my kind of typing. A family of blue jays visits front yard cherry. Fledglings beg, wings quivering, mouths open, bright red (even in fog). Every time a parent leaves the cherry tree, two or three fledglings follow, piteously screaming. No rest for the weary; reminded me of suppertime when the boys were young.
From my porch, on a bright July morning, I can see Mount Ascutney, forty miles away, more an afterthought than a keynote, far beyond more imposing Gove Hill. Slightest atmospheric moisture screens Ascutney, which vanishes into a blue-gray haze. The feature that dominates both my view and my imagination is the wetlands, cradled in a narrow valley. Although labeled Gillette Swamp on the USGS Lyme Quadrangle, my boys, claimed naming rights years ago, calling our homeground Coyote Hollow, in tribute to the serenades that echoed off the western hills.
Waterlogged shrubs on the east and north and evergreens along the western and Southern perimeter hem the sixty-acre wetlands. Technically, Coyote Hollow is an intermediate fen, marshy, peat building, alkaline. An unnamed brook drains the marsh into the East Branch of the Ompompanoosuc.
When we moved here twenty-three years ago, the water level was much higher. I snorkeled the main channel, which was four-feet deep, with Casey, who towed his brother Jordan in a kayak. Beaver cut passages through the reeds and maintained a dam at the outlet, backing water up to the rim of our lower pasture. In those high-water days, marsh wrens nested in the cattails. Muskrat lodges punctuated the reeds, and a wayfaring otter was standard. One spring, a mother mink birthed pups in an abandoned beaver lodge. On July nights, windows open, I'd fall asleep to winnowing snipe. Windows didn't need to be open to hear six different species of frogs.
Moose and bear passed through regularly. Itinerant bald eagles and osprey stopped to study the water, anticipating fish, which were scarce . . . and small. Sometimes loons proceeded their voices across the valley. And one Arctic December day, I saw an immature golden eagle, high in the sky, circling, circling, circling.
When the beavers' food supplied dwindled—they ate themselves out of house and home, literally—they broke camp. The water level dropped. No more kayaking. No more snorkeling. Wrens, snipe, and muskrats moved on. I haven't seen a moose in many years. The frog population crashed.
But the bitterns and swamp sparrows, yellowthroats and alder flycatchers remain. And when the sun comes up, a family of blue jays still welcomes dawn, and the flash of a tanager still blazes the oaks, always keeps cadence with the eternal spiral of the seasons.